Madeleine (22 page)

Madeleine was still trying to get a job, but had little success. She was thinner than ever, living on vegetables and cheese from the Portobello Road stalls, and she was smoking heavily. But she found Colville Gardens blissful. Up among the trees it was decidedly heavenly, with the rhythm of each leisurely day marked by the All Saints bells. Madeleine had begun attending Church of England services before the move to Notting Hill, but now, with a church so close that she could almost touch it from her kitchen window, she became a regular attendant.

Madeleine was a cultural Anglican: the vicarage was in her blood. But, increasingly, the church became embedded in Madeleine's life. She loved the music. She had not played the piano for many years, but she had a deep interest in music of all sorts, from traditional hymns to jazz. All Saints was a High-Church parish and some elements of its practice—such as the use of the Catholic mass books rather than the
Book of Common
Prayer
—irritated her. But it was a beautiful building and she was prepared to overlook the ‘bells and smells' copied from Rome.

Her years at St Catherine's had given her ‘a very solid grounding in the C of E texts'. But Madeleine had rejected religion as a teenager. Now she was drawn to the idea of transcendence through religion as well as all its rituals. In 2004, she said:

I am the sort of person who needs to be in a nice church or I don't want to be in any church. If it is some dreary little evangelical church with bad music and a dreary little vicar with an Australian accent, then I don't want to be there. If the service is not a nicely conducted one with the right stuff, the right atmosphere, I don't want to go.
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All Saints passed the test. It was a fine building with broad, well-proportioned aisles. It had been badly bombed during World War II, but when it reopened in 1951 it had new shrines, painted gold-leaf altarpieces and all the trappings of a High-Church place of worship. For Madeleine, the Church of England was also appealing because it was so much a part of the English landscape. As the official established church, it was woven into public life in a way she had never experienced in Australia. She loved walking across the square on Sunday mornings and chatting in the church porch after the service.

Religion was important to Madeleine. One of the relationships she consistently explored in her novels was between her characters and God. She was interested in living a moral life in a secular age. In
A Pure Clear
Light
, published in 1996, one of her characters stands in the kitchen praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary and drags her family off to Communion on Christmas Eve. Faith is applauded, not denigrated, in her novels.

But Madeleine had eclectic tastes. In the early years at Notting Hill she still attended
kirtans.
Swami-ji did not ask his followers to reject Christianity, and Madeleine continued to look to both the church and the ashram for enlightenment. Friends who had scoffed at her attachment to an Indian guru were similarly surprised by her Anglican faith. Neither belief system seemed to gel with the acerbic Madeleine they had known in the 1960s.
⁸
Nor with the woman immersed in a project on Madame Blavatsky.

Madeleine was struggling with the biography after a decade of work, but it was clear to Felicity Baker that she was a gifted writer. She recalled that the manuscript was a critical look at Blavatsky. She felt her cousin was past her ‘ashram phase' and was sceptical of theosophy and deeply committed to Anglican theology. But she did not think the biography was coherent. Little was known of Blavatsky's childhood, and Madeleine had opted to write a ‘creative' version of her early years. She had written a ‘tremendously sensitive picture of what it was like to emerge as a little girl in such a world, at such a time'. But merging that story with factual narrative was difficult, and Madeleine had not managed to tie the threads of the book together.
⁹

Madeleine made friends with a small group of people in the All Saints congregation, among them, a young artist named Celia Irvine. The two women met at a religious retreat, which comprised a series of weekly meetings.
¹⁰
Madeleine and Celia were close to two other people at that point: David Bambridge, a primary school teacher, and Frances Barrett, who had attended All Saints since she was a small child. Frances organised the coffee after the Sunday services and sang in the choir. Celia, a talented artist, decorated the paschal candle and organised a carpet of flowers in the church on Corpus Christi Sunday.

Madeleine hovered at the edges. She loved the cut and thrust of debate outside the church after the Sunday service and was at times involved in the choir, but when Frances asked her to visit a sick parishioner, Madeleine said, ‘I go to church in order to worship God, not to do social work.'
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More interesting to Madeleine were the arguments with the vicar, Father John Brownsell. Madeleine, David and Celia were a little gang of dissenters. They saw themselves as the ‘naughty background kids' who challenged the vicar's decisions.
¹²
He had created an atmosphere that was so High-Church, Frances recalled, that ‘Catholics didn't even know they were not in a Catholic church'.
¹³

The Church of England was the ‘FUN church', Madeleine told Judith McCue.
¹⁴
But she was serious about religion. She believed ‘that we are all equally sinners and that we are all equally redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and we have to work out our salvation on the ground day to day'.
¹⁵
She said that her belief in God was her only way of managing a life that she often felt was ‘a chaos of failure and futility'.
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As always, Madeleine kept aspects of her life and her friendship circles separate, although she once took Celia along to a
kirtan
held in a big house in Kilburn. There were about forty people, and copious amounts of tea were served. Everyone took off their shoes and danced. She was grateful to God, she told Deidre Rubenstein, who had spent five years at the ashram before returning to her life as an actor in Melbourne:

God has been wonderfully good & I am wonderfully nervous—wondering what game I am
meant
to be playing—for it can't really be this nice, so enjoyable—when is that monster going to leap out from the wings?
¹⁷

Celia and the rest of the little gang sometimes gathered at Madeleine's flat, where their hostess appeared to live on air. Invited for a meal once, the friends were presented with half a lettuce leaf each with tomatoes and sour cream.
¹⁸
And although the flat was simply furnished, Madeleine was houseproud. She changed the curtains from summer to winter, and the flat was almost always filled with music from the BBC. The Blavatsky research was in evidence, with books out on the dining table. One day Madeleine talked Frances into helping her proof the manuscript and they spent hours sitting on the floor, wading through the punctuation.
¹⁹

Madeleine was an engaging but complicated friend. Frances wondered at times whether this expatriate Australian was striking a calculated pose for effect. One day she telephoned Madeleine before lunch, only to get a blast: ‘Christ, Frances, I don't know how to tell you, but one does not usually ring before 10 o'clock!' One Christmas morning after church, Frances popped over to Colville Gardens but could not stay long. Madeleine was livid. She had organised nothing but had assumed a few of the gang would be around to celebrate—she worked on a very loose timetable and was often oblivious to the pressures on people with regular jobs and families. Frances was appalled, and she took a step back from her demanding friend.

Frances had often lent Madeleine money to tide her over a financial crisis. Madeleine was scrupulous about repaying the money quickly, always with a small gift and loving notes. Once she wrote:

Dear Frances, £100 with my most grateful thanks. You must have pulled me out of more financial black holes than you've had hot dinners, at least lately—so here's a cold pudding to make up the difference. Hope it's OK! As I've never made it before & as you see it has not been tasted. Lots of Love, Madeleine.
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Other friends bailed her out too. Judith McCue sent money from Chicago. In February 1989, Madeleine wrote to Judith to say that her cheque to Judith had not been cashed and so she therefore proposed to repay her by buying ‘frocks' for her young daughter, Jessica.
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But survival in these years was often cobbled together. Madeleine's flat was distinctive, thanks to her talent at putting the pieces together, but it was freezing, and her friends wondered what she lived on.
²²

Frances saw how vulnerable Madeleine was. When Darling Point died, Madeleine told Frances that life without her cat was ‘quite incredibly lonely'.
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But soon Madeleine had another cat, a prized Turkish Vann called Puck, brilliantly white with different-coloured eyes—one blue, one brown. The All Saint's curate, Father David Clues, conducted a blessing ceremony, and Frances stood as godmother.
²⁴

Madeleine had always been quick to judge and lecture her friends, but this character trait was becoming even more pronounced. When Vidya Jones and her two young sons returned to London in 1985, the friends saw each other rarely and Vidya found Madeleine difficult:

She was very sweet, she had a very sweet blithe quality, charming and
je ne sais quoi
; she really was one of those people who had an extra little thing. But she had another side to her, the side that was quite sharp and bitter. She couldn't help herself. It was not that
you
went on or off,
she
went on or off. You wouldn't know why. You could be having a lovely day with her and then she would get sick of you. She didn't have the capacity to keep something going. There's always a lull in friendship but you sustain it because you like the person. She would just destroy everything, destroy a relationship.
²⁵

Vidya had known Madeleine well for many years and loved her, and she understood her shortcomings. Madeleine was outgoing and sociable but often attacked those closest to her. The most common complaint about Madeleine, voiced by many of her friends over the decades, was that when there was a rupture, it was inexplicable. They would rack their brains but could never identify what they had done to cause offence.

Madeleine often looked for ways to control her friends. She wanted them to be better, and to fit them into the picture she had created of them and of her life. She set about remodelling David Bambridge. He recalled that Madeleine was ‘quite cutting and prickly…rather grand at times, but also kind, generous and funny'. She was forever trying to improve him, once presenting him with a tweed jacket she had bought in a charity shop, with the implied message that it was suitable attire for a true English gentleman. On another occasion, it was an old copy of Fowler's
Modern English Usage.
Some of her gifts had a fustier value, like the GPO Bakelite telephone she found on a skip.
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Sometimes Madeleine met Felicity Baker for long walks around Kensington. Their relationship was complicated. Felicity was an academic at University College in London, and she felt that Madeleine was contemptuous of her success—Madeleine, not having followed the usual career paths in pursuit of a more creative life, and with little to show for her choice, protected herself by denigrating those who had. Felicity knew, too, that her cousin needed to control every situation. On the rare occasions when Felicity telephoned her, Madeleine immediately said she would call her back in a few minutes. It was clear that she needed time to get herself together and decide how to manage the conversation.
²⁷

Madeleine's relationship with her friend Judith McCue, who was now living in the US, was also complex. Her letters to Judith were lively, honest and intimate. But on the phone Madeleine was often scornful and attacked Judith's domestic happiness. Madeleine had wanted marriage and children, but now she could only survive her disappointment by dismissing the lifestyle she had not achieved.
²⁸

The patterns of Madeleine's interactions were becoming entrenched. Over and over, she would draw people in with her loving charm, intelligence, creativity and high values. But before long she would create a crisis or an argument, driving away friends who were left bewildered by her behaviour. Then, after a break, a card or phone call would signal a desire to resume relations. All her life, Madeleine made sure she rejected others before they could abandon her, then hauled them back on her terms.

At Colville Gardens, Madeleine was more isolated than she had been at her other London addresses. Her street in Notting Hill was quiet and there were several flights of stairs between her home and the world outside. The temptation to bed down on the couch and watch old movies in the afternoons on her old black-and-white television was strong. On the positive side, the distance from the world helped Madeleine focus on her writing, and she began to devote more time to the Blavatsky biography. In a letter to Judith in November 1986, she wrote:

A dark November day, about 5 leaves left to fall, opera on R3, cat licking his lips, clock ticking & me at an impasse or a mini-impasse having written about 1¾ chapters of MY BOOK (which took about 1 ½ months—clock that!) & in a state of the can'ts about the next bit due to having just read over typescript…
²⁹

Writing was now a part of Madeleine's daily life, even if it was a cause of anxiety. She had a purpose. She told Judith that writing was:

guaranteed to make pretty well everything else in life seem easy-calm-& problem-free. I find myself worrying about it all the time that I am not actually writing & that is most of the time so you could say that it has changed my life really & whether or not a publishable MS emerges from the experience seems to me at the moment the merest detail.
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